Re: What are the elements listed in a dictionary?
Re: What are the elements listed in a dictionary?
- Subject: Re: What are the elements listed in a dictionary?
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 23:54:04 +0000
Jeffrey Mattox wrote:
Thanks for the comments, but I'm still confused. Perhaps some
specificity to my original question would help:
A text field also has elements such as "movie view" and
"progress indicator." What does this mean, and how can I
use this information?
How can a text field contain a movie view or a progress indicator?
Because someone decided it'd be a Good Thing if they could. Anything
is possible when someone has the will and way to make it happen.
Try stepping back for a moment to see the bigger picture. Here's a
practical experiment to help: create a new document in TextEdit and
type in some text. Then copy-n-paste or drag-n-drop some jpegs, movs
and aiffs into it to embed them in the text. This is possible because
text field objects are designed to hold image and movie view objects
as well as text objects. Pretty amazing stuff, if you sit back and
think about what must be going on beneath the surface to make it
happen. Not that users ever need to do so, of course, as it's all
been designed to work simply and seamlessly on the surface.
Think of objects as software's answer to "plug-n-play"; mix-n-match
components which can be swapped around, placed one inside another,
etc, allowing all manner of fancy structures (e.g. hierarchical file
systems, DTP documents) to be assembled from relatively simple
building blocks. GUI objects are just one part of this great and
glorious virtual Lego set, having the ability to draw themselves to
screen alongside whatever other talents their designers gave them.
Whether or not an application exposes any/some/all of these
interesting structures to _scripters_ is another question, however.
For example, TextEdit exposes only the text bit (and rather poorly at
that), but there may be other applications which expose more,
allowing you to (e.g.) embed a movie in a text document via
AppleScript by sending it a command like 'make new movie view at end
of paragraph 3 of document 1 with data myMovie'. As a scripter,
you're limited by the objects and commands the application exposes in
its scripting interface, so sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's
not.
If you're looking for more specific info, perhaps say what
application you're talking about. (Or, if you're still having trouble
understanding what properties, elements, objects, etc. are, just say
so. It can take a while for such concepts to click, and folk are
always keen to help.)
HTH
has
--
http://www.barple.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk -- The Little Page of AppleScripts
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